Ed Sheeran and the Shape of Streaming

It’s hard to escape the engulfing, yet endearing nature of Ed Sheeran. Love him or hate him, his success cannot be denied. He occupied nine of the top 10 positions in the UK singles charts on release of his new album, ÷ (Divide), and had a record-breaking 18 singles in the Australian Top 40. In case that hasn’t convinced you, ÷ is also No 1 in 23 countries, including the US, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden.

Official single and album charts tell only one side of the story, however. The real competition is taking place between music streaming sites. Sheeran has already broken multiple records on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, but how did these sites fair when being discussed on social media? Who dominated the streaming conversation? Where were these conversations taking place? Who led these conversations? These are the questions that Storyful’s Corporate Intelligence team try to answer through social insights and data analysis.

Storyful examined conversations taking place relating to Ed Sheeran and Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and on the wider web for the two-week period between March 3 (his album’s release date) and March 17.

Spotify dominated conversation, receiving 30,000 mentions over the timespan. YouTube followed with 21,000 mentions. Apple Music trailed in last place with just 4,100 mentions.

The graph below shows each platform’s share of voice over the two weeks. Spotify dominated conversation for the first week, before YouTube stole the baton from March 9 onward. Both platforms finished with relatively equal mentions. Apple Music began strongly, but did not pick up any significant traction with only slight peaks seen on March 5 and 11.

Spotify’s surge at the beginning can be attributed to Sheeran’s album breaking streaming records on the platform. This feat got media coverage and sparked social conversations. Between March 3 and 9, the most popular keywords in Spotify and Ed Sheeran conversations were “top 16” (3,600 mentions) and “first day” (2,600). Conversation leaders at this time included Connor McLaughlin (5,000 retweets) and music news site Pop Crave (1,400 retweets).

YouTube’s time to shine came after March 10. On this day, James Corden tweeted about an upcoming Carpool Karaoke starring Ed Sheeran and linked to his YouTube channel. This tweet drove mentions on that day, with a total of 3,500 retweets. YouTube’s mentions also got significant traction after a live performance by Sheeran at the iHeart Radio Theater in New York. Between March 10 to 14, YouTube videos from the concert received more than 2,000 mentions.

A breakdown of which social sites these conversations were taking place on can be seen below. Twitter dominated all three conversations. YouTube mentions contained 4 percent video content, versus 2 percent for Apple Music and zero for Spotify.

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As already mentioned, Sheeran has a marmite-like appeal – people either love him, or hate him. Storyful has the ability to measure the sentiment of a post by assessing keywords and grouping them as overtly positive or overtly negative. Below, you can see these results across the three conversations. All three platforms measured much higher positive sentiment than negative, with 18 percent of all Apple Music conversation expressing some form of liking towards the singer and/or streaming site. Ed’s overwhelming popularity can be further reinforced with the fact that the words “shit” or “crap” were only used in Spotify conversation 32 times, YouTube conversation three times and Apple Music conversation 12 times.

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Overall, Storyful’s analysis found that Spotify’s 40 million subscribers make more noise than YouTube’s 50 million daily users. And although Apple Music’s users may love Ed more than the other two platforms, it doesn’t have the same impact on social conversations.

Don’t forget to ask how Storyful can help you create more engaging content with social insights and video.